Impact

by Douglas Preston

  “That’s right. And it seems his predecessor, Dr. Freeman, was also murdered—and not by a homeless man. Both he and Corso were killed by a professional—someone looking for that very drive on the table.”

  A deep silence settled over the room.

  “So you see,” said Ford, “we have a big job ahead of us. Because not only is the world apparently under attack, but someone on our side has betrayed us.”

  81

  Burr handed the VHF mike to the lobsterman, placing it in his manacled hands. It didn’t matter what he said now; Burr just wanted to remind the girl her father was alive and in desperate straits, keep her terrified, panicked, easier to handle.

  “Dad? Dad? Are you okay?”

  “Abbey! Get the hell off the water! Your boat can’t take it! Go!”

  “Dad.” There was a choking silence. “We’re out of fuel.”

  “Good God, Abbey, he’s got a gun. Call the Coast Guard! Don’t be fooled—”

  Burr snatched back the mike. It was an obscure, unused channel and they were broadcasting at a quarter watt, a range that wouldn’t reach the mainland, especially in this weather—but why take chances?

  “You hear that?” he said into the mike. “Everything’s going to be okay, you’ll get your father back. I need you alive, I can’t get the drive otherwise. Think about it—you’re more useful to me alive than dead. We need to figure this out, but let’s do it in a place where we’re not going to drown. You hear me?”

  “I hear you,” Abbey said tersely.

  He clicked off, thinking that they probably didn’t believe it but what could they do? He was holding all the cards. Sure, they might have some stupid plan but it wasn’t going to work.

  The boat rose on a wave and lurched to starboard. Christ, he hadn’t been paying attention. A rogue wave was approaching, a two-story wall of water, black as Guinness with a breaking crest. He turned the wheel toward the wave, the boat lifting fast. But he couldn’t get it all the way around before the roaring crest slammed into the hull, knocking the boat sideways, and it fell back as ebony water burst over the gunwale, pushing the boat down and heeling it over.

  The boat tipped into the trough, the water boiling out the scuppers, the deck tilting thirty degrees from the horizontal, while he clung to the wheel, speechless with fear. He tried to turn the wheel, but it was as if a huge weight was pushing back, pressing the boat down. He shoved the throttle forward but heard no answering rumble from the engine, just the creaking strain of thousands of pounds of water roaring over the boat. And then the wheel began to loosen up and the boat shuddered as the weight of the sea lessened, the water pouring off the bow and gunwales. Gradually it righted itself.

  Burr had never been so frightened in his life. He looked at the chartplotter; they were halfway to Devil’s Limb. Behind the reef they could at least get into the lee of this crazy sea. They were going six knots—how much longer would it take? Ten minutes. Ten more minutes of hell.

  “Let me take the helm,” said the fisherman. “You’re going to sink this boat.”

  “Fuck off.” Burr braced himself as another whitecapped comber came at them, the boat rising swiftly to meet the boiling mountain of water, which slammed into it, the pilothouse shuddering and groaning as if about to come apart at the seams. If it fried the electronics . . . he’d be helpless.

  He clung to the wheel, the boat sinking precipitously down the backside into another bottomless trough of the wave, the water swirling around his feet and rushing for the scuppers.

  “Unlock me,” said Straw. “Otherwise we’re both going to the bottom.”

  Burr fished in his pocket and pulled out the key. He stretched out his hand. “Unlock yourself, bring the cuffs.”

  Keeping one hand on the wheel, he pulled out his gun and watched as Straw unlocked his cuffs and came forward, holding the rail for stability.

  The boat wallowed for a moment in the trough, eerily quiet, and began to mount up. It was turning broadside again.

  “Gimme the helm!” Straw cried, seizing it.

  Burr stepped back, pointing the gun at him. “Lock yourself to the wheel.”

  The fisherman ignored him, struggling with the wheel and throttling up as the boat tipped up the face of the wave, steeper and steeper, and suddenly the wind was howling around them, the air full of water, all confusion and noise. The boat rammed through the crest and fell back down, righting itself and subsiding into the churning trough.

  “I said lock your wrist to the wheel!” Burr fired a round through the roof to underscore the demand.

  The fisherman locked his left wrist to the steeling wheel. Burr stepped over, tested it, making sure it was really locked, took the key and tossed it into the sea.

  “You follow the course straight to the reef. Any tricks and I’ll kill you. And then I’ll kill your daughter.”

  The boat rose on another wave and a lightning bolt split the sky with a terrific roar, briefly illuminating a wilderness of water.

  Burr braced himself as the next wave bore down on them. The fisherman said nothing, hanging grimly onto the wheel, his face set toward darkness.

  82

  In the silence, there was a faint squeaking of wheels and a duty officer came in pushing a cart, serving coffee all around.

  “You said you were to make a recommendation to the president at seven,” Ford said. “What are the options?”

  Lockwood spread his hands. “Dr. Chaudry?”

  Chaudry rubbed a hand over his finely sculpted cheek. “We’ve got half a dozen satellites orbiting Mars. We had planned to reassign all to a new mission—to locate the source of these attacks. But now you seem to have those coordinates.”

  “Yes,” said Mickelson, “and with those coordinates we could use one or more of those satellites as a weapon, send it crashing into the alien weapon at high speed.”

  Chaudry shook his head. “That would be about as effective as throwing an egg at a tank.”

  “Option two,” said Mickelson, ploughing ahead, “is to launch a nuke at it.”

  “The launch window wouldn’t be for another six months minimum,” said Chaudry, “and the travel time to Mars would be well over a year.”

  “The nuclear option is our only effective means of attack,” said the chairman of the Joint Chiefs from a screen.

  Chaudry turned to him. “Admiral, I doubt the alien weapon is going to sit there and allow itself to be nuked.”

  “May I remind you again that the operative word here is ‘machine.’ We don’t know for a fact that it is a weapon,” said Lockwood.

  “It’s a Goddamned weapon,” said Mickelson. “Just look at it!”

  Chaudry spoke quietly. “That artifact comes from a civilization of tremendous technological sophistication. I’m truly aghast that you people think we can kill it with a nuke. We’re like a cockroach committee debating how to kill the exterminator. Any military option is futile—and exceedingly dangerous—and the sooner we recognize it the better.”

  A tense silence built. The conference room had grown hot. Ford took the opportunity to remove his jacket and casually draped it over the back of his chair. The bait, he thought. Now to hook the fish. Or the mole, as it were.

  83

  The Marea II crested another terrifying wave and Abbey caught a glimpse, through the lashing rain, of a smudge of whitewater ahead. The chartplotter placed them a few hundred yards from the first of the three great rocks.

  “There! Ahead!”

  “I see it,” said Jackie calmly, easing the wheel over. “I’m heading into the lee.”

  The sea calmed as they entered the protected area of water behind the rocks. A huge swell still warped through, but the chop and wind dropped considerably. As the boat rose and fell, Abbey could see immense seas thundering along the base of the rocks, some of the curlers reaching twenty feet or more, rearing into the rock and exploding upward as if in slow motion, great spumes of atomized water.

  “All right,” said Jackie, as she b
rought the boat into a slow, tight circle. “What’s the plan?”

  “I—” Abbey hesitated. “We pretend to surrender. He’ll take us aboard his boat and then we’ll look for our opportunity.”

  Jackie stared. “You call that a plan?”

  “What else can we do?”

  “He’s going to kill us, boom boom. And that’s it. There won’t be time to ‘look for an opportunity.’ And don’t fool yourself, he ain’t giving up your father. Abbey, I want to save your father but I don’t want to throw away my own life. You understand?”

  “I’m thinking,” Abbey gasped.

  Jackie brought the boat around in a slow circle, staying close to the lee shore. “Stop hyperventilating, he’s going to be here any minute. Focus. You’re smart. You can do it.”

  Abbey turned to the radar to see if she could get a fix on the approaching boat. She fiddled with the gain, trying to tune out the rain and sea return. The screen was a wash of static. Slowly, as she manipulated the various parameters, she began to get an image of the huge exposed reefs to starboard, big green blobs on the screen. And then she saw another blob, smaller, washing in and out—moving toward them.

  “That’s it,” she said. “They’re here. Back the boat in that channel between the two rocks.”

  “You crazy? That’s a narrow channel with surf on both sides!”

  “Give me the helm then.”

  “No. I’ll do it.”

  “Get the boat in there so he can’t see us on his radar.”

  Jackie stared at her, face pale. “And then?”

  “We need weapons.” Abbey threw open the cabin door and scrambled down the shuddering steps—hanging onto the rails. With a hideous feeling of déjà vu, she threw open the cabin, hauled out the toolbox, and removed a small pair of marine bolt cutters, standard onboard equipment for dealing with frozen bolts, clamps, and rods. She also took out a fish knife and a long Phillips-head screwdriver. She came back up and slammed the tools on the dash.

  Abbey grabbed Jackie by both shoulders and leaned into her face. “You want a plan? Here it is. Ram. Board. Kill him. Cut Dad free.”

  “We ram them and we’re both gonna sink.”

  “Not if you hit them broadside, aft of the pilothouse. The skeg’ll just ride up on the gunwale, I’ll jump off, and then you reverse like hell and pull back off before the boat breaks its spine. The Marea II’s built like a brick shit house.”

  “Ram, board, and kill? He’s armed! What’ve we got—a fish knife?”

  “You got a better plan?”

  “No.”

  “Then we go with what we’ve got.”

  The green blob on the radar screen was creeping closer. Abbey glanced out at the dark water and could see a glimmer of light.

  “He’s got his spotlights on! Get going!”

  Jackie throttled the boat up and moved it behind the rock, backing and turning furiously, fighting the wind, sea, and a powerful current running between the rocks. The roaring noise of the surf was deafening, the wind blowing tatters of spume over their boat. Jackie struggled to keep the boat in the middle of the channel, beyond the rearing breakers that thundered into the spires of rock.

  “How am I going to know when to come out and ram him?”

  “He’ll enter the lee,” said Abbey, “just like we did. He’ll be looking for us, shining the light around. A slow target. When he doesn’t see us he’ll call. That’s our signal. Wait for him to get broadside, then you come out full-speed ahead and t-bone him. Here, take a knife.”

  Jackie took the long fish knife and stuck it into her belt.

  Abbey stuck a long thin screwdriver in one pocket and pushed the boltcutters through a belt loop. “I’ll be at the bow rail, ready to jump on board.”

  The sea pushed the boat toward the rocks and Jackie struggled to control it, reversing, trying to keep it out of the sucking surf. “It isn’t going to work—”

  “Don’t say it.”

  84

  The clocks in the room approached 3 A.M. as the discussion crawled along, going nowhere. From the flat-panel at the end of the room, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs finally said a few words, addressing them to Chaudry. His voice was mild, courteous. “If you wish to take the military option off the table, Dr. Chaudry, what do you propose to replace it with?”

  Chaudry stared at him. “Study. Research. Now that we know where it is—assuming that image is of the thing responsible for the strangelet missiles—we can redirect all our moveable satellite resources toward it. We just need to get the coordinates off that disk.”

  “And then?” the chairman asked.

  “We attempt communication.”

  “And what, exactly, would we say?”

  “Explain that we want peace—that we’re a peaceful people. We aren’t a threat to them.”

  “A peaceful people?” Mickelson said, with a snort. “Let’s hope that ‘machine’ has been sound asleep over the past few bloody centuries.”

  “That may in fact be the problem,” said Chaudry, “the reason it’s threatening us. Because of our aggressive behavior. Who knows how long it’s been monitoring us, listening in on all our radio and television broadcasts which have been pouring into space for the past century. Its computers would decipher them, of course. Anyone looking at all our news broadcasts over the past hundred years would take a dim view of humanity.”

  “How the hell would it know English?” Mickelson asked.

  “If it was built to keep tabs on intelligent life,” said Chaudry, “it’s probably got exceedingly powerful artificial intelligence capabilities; one would assume it could decipher any language.”

  “How old is it? When was it built?”

  Ford spoke up. “The image shows erosion and pitting by micrometeoroids as well as blanketing by regolith thrown up by ancient impacts. That machine’s at least a few hundred million years old.”

  Mickelson turned to Chaudry. “You agree?”

  Chaudry scrutinized the image. “Yes, I do. This is very old.”

  “So you think it’s real?”

  Chaudry hesitated. “I’d like to see the original images and its location before I answer that question.”

  “We don’t have time right now for verification,” said Lockwood. “We have four hours to report to the president. Let’s pass by the military option and move on to communication. Assuming it can interpret English, do we communicate with it?”

  “We’ve got to reassure them we mean no harm,” said Chaudry.

  “You start pleading peace with them,” Mickelson said, “that’s advertising your weakness.”

  “We are weak,” said Chaudry, “and that machine knows it.”

  Silence followed.

  Derkweiler raised a hand. “The Spacewatch group at NPF has been studying ways to divert killer asteroids. Maybe we could use one of their techniques to nudge a large asteroid from the Asteroid Belt and send it plunging into the machine. Like a dinosaur-extinction-size asteroid.”

  Chaudry shook his head. “It would take years to plan such a mission, launch it, and get it to Mars. And we don’t even have the technology yet to do it. We’ve got to tell the president the truth: we have no options.” He glared around the room.

  This was followed by another long silence, which Lockwood finally broke. “We’re still hung up on the military option. Forget the military option and let’s talk about something else—what the hell is this machine, who put it there, and what’s it trying to do?”

  Ford cleared his throat. “It might be defective.”

  “Defective?” Chaudry looked surprised.

  “It’s old. It’s been sitting for a long time,” said Ford. “If it’s damaged, maybe there’s a way to mislead it. Fool it. Trick it in some way. Its behavior up to this point has been erratic, unpredictable. That may not be deliberate—it may be a sign of malfunctioning.”

  “How?” asked Mickelson.

  At this a silence fell. Lockwood glanced at his watch. “It’s almost da
wn. I ordered a quick breakfast at five in the private dining room. We’ll patch over the others and continue the discussion there.”

  Ford rose, deliberately leaving his jacket draped on the back of the chair. He exited the room and waited in the hall for the room to empty, the stragglers emerging and making their way to the dining room at the far end of the hall. Ford lingered near the door, watching everyone leave. The second to last to leave was Marjory Leung. She looked like hell. Ford had been sure she was the mole, but she hadn’t taken his bait.

  Chaudry was the last to emerge from the conference room.

  The mission director came out, his hand just withdrawing from his suitcoat pocket. Ford stepped up quickly as if to speak to him confidentially, shot his hand into the pocket, and pulled out a piece of paper.

  “What the hell—?” Chaudry cried, his wiry body moving like lightning, his arm shooting out to snatch back the paper, but Ford sprang back out of reach.

  He held the paper up before a group of astonished witnesses. “This is the password to the hard drive. Dr. Chaudry here just lifted it out of my jacket pocket. I said there was a mole in your group. And we just caught him.”

  85

  Burr stood in the pilothouse, swiveling the spotlight around, peering into the storm. The beam stabbed into the raging murk, showing nothing but boiling water and rocks. Where were they? Had they drifted out of the lee? He fiddled with the dials of the radar, trying to tune in a coherent image beyond the limited range of the light, but all he could get was static.

  A bolt of lightning flashed, illuminating the towering rocks on his right. The roar of surf was almost deafening and the water around him was webbed with spindrift, the sea heaving.

  “Son of a bitch!” Burr pulled down the VHF mike and pressed transmit. “Where are you?”

  No answer.

  “Respond or he’s dead!”